[Music] the research on displine started to become a lot more prevalent around Zero Tolerance policies um so Zero Tolerance policy started um after the Coline shooting so after that shooting in high school which was horrible um people started to think try to think a lot more about school shootings and what's happening in schools and um what started to crop up or what's called Zero Tolerance policies or basically they were saying if you engage in certain behaviors then you automatically get suspended or expelled um and I think probably at the time it was for very serious behaviors very um violent behaviors but over time it's kind of EX expanded a little bit more to in um be include a lot more behaviors um so bullying so that Al that became um really big in their research as well in the last few decades and so that started to pull into zero intolerance policy so the first time you bully someone you get suspended and expelled um and then it just started to expand more so just generally speaking these policies um ha have taken place where for you know other kinds of behaviors that may be even less violent or less serious that students will get automatically suspended or expelled and so because of this uptick in this policy that happened um and the paying attention to these behaviors which was good we want to pay attention to the student student behaviors there has been an increase of um suspensions and expulsions and also an increase in these disparities that we're seeing in the data and so now I would say more recently people have been trying to move away from just automatically suspending and expelling students moving away from using that as a first line of defense versus a last line of defense and thinking about what are some other other more positive things that we can do to address disa Ary issues within the school rather than suspending and expelling both because a lot of students have gotten suspended and expelled which we know is not good for any student to be disconnected from their school in their classroom but also because of the disparities that we see um in the data so we definitely have to have a balance of preventive and intervention measures for behavior for sure I would say also that the percentage of students who are engaging and really dangerous Behavior violent Behavior even bringing a school a uh bringing a gun to school or fighting or doing things that are more violent is a small percentage of what's actually happening in a school and for the students who are engaging in the most violent behaviors yes they probably do need to be suspended or there needs to be some sort of consequence it and we still need to figure out what's going on for that student and do some sort of root cause to figure out what's going on what kind of supports do they need um so we do need systems in place to help students who are in that percent very small percentage um however that's not the majority of the students that are getting in trouble in school that's not the majority of students who are getting suspended in school mostly it's for things like talking back to a teacher for being kind of disrespectful whatever however somebody wants to interpret what being disrespectful means and those behaviors don't lead to the violent behaviors it's not like oh if you talk back to a teacher then that means that the next thing you not escalate in terms of your problem behaviors that we need to automatically like expend uh suspend or expel that student and so instead we need to be thinking about what do we do with those students how do we interpret that behavior um and a lot of it is trying to prevent the behavior from happening in the first place or intervening in a um in a non-punitive nonreactive way to what's going on visit us online at ideast stream.org welcome for more web extras links to resources and to watch the documentary you are welcome creating safe and supportive schools a production of idea stream public media